Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
Have you ever been so cold it felt like you were burning? That’s my current situation. Or am I actually on fire? I need to open my eyes. Why is this so hard? What’s that stench? Is someone cooking?
My eyelids are like old, stiff leather, but I fight them open.
The first thing I see is the black sky and the bright stars.
Then I let my gaze lower to my body. The leather that Cait let me borrow is charred in places.
My hands are red and welted, with blackened tips.
I try to move my fingers, but they’re numb.
Frostbite? Or did I get so burnt, my nerve endings are dead?
Guy! He was right beside me when I passed out.
If I’m burned, he may be, too. I roll onto my side.
My back pop-pop-pops as I do, and I swear I can hear my muscles groaning from the effort.
I’m in tears by the time I get into place.
He’s there, but I’m a little further away than he was when I was fighting, and it’s hard to see in the dark.
I take a deep breath, knowing this is going to hurt like fuck.
Using my numb hand, I pull myself forward inch by inch through the fresh snow.
When I get close enough to touch him, I scream, not from the pain but from the sight of him.
His clothes are little more than ribbons and ash.
His skin is as black as onyx and as knotted as a tree root. The smell…It’s him.
My stomach lurches, and I know I’m going to vomit from the realization that he smells like dinner. It’s agony to move, but I refuse to puke on him or myself, so I force my body to a sitting position and turn my head away from him so that all my bile falls on the snow on the other side of my body.
Guy…I failed him. All I had to do was make sure no one hurt him.
Instead, I tried my hand at DPS. I’ve never been content to be a support class.
That’s why I never played a healer, why I was upset that the game classed me as a cleric.
But this isn’t a game, not to us, and now it’s killed someone that I…
I shake my head. I’m not even ready to think that, especially not now.
Kiss of Life! I have a spell that can bring him back. I wanted to save those up as long as possible, but this is Guy. If I have to, I’ll use up all my kisses. But where are his lips? His face looks like a lump of bleeding coal. In order to save him, I have to press my mouth to that.
I swallow down another wave of nausea and lean forward.
The closer I get, the more he smells like last night’s barbecue.
I tap the Kiss of Life spell on my menu and squeeze my eyes closed.
Maybe if I can’t see him, I can pretend my other senses don’t work either.
Thank God my lips have lost all sensation; I don’t want to know what kissing a burnt corpse feels like.
My lips press against some unknown part of his face. I hope it’s his lips, but I’m not sure it has to be his lips to work. It’s a peck, hardly the romantic notion that played in my head when I gained the spell. There’s nothing sweet or yearning about this moment, just grim desperation.
A croak rumbles from him, and I know he’s alive, but for how long?
He can’t talk or even open his eyes like this.
There’s no telling if there’s damage to his organs.
Just the Kiss of Life spell sapped me, but I know I need to cast Heal Major Wound.
So I do. As soon as I tap the spell on my menu, I watch Guy’s flesh renew, and he sucks in a sharp breath which he coughs out at once.
Tears burn down my frostbitten cheeks as his eyes open.
Relief floods me because he’s back, but also, I grieve.
Guy almost killed himself because he couldn’t bear to look at his burn scars in the mirror anymore.
He wants to stay in Peripeteia so he never has to go back to that again.
My healing spell wasn’t enough to heal him completely.
Guy sits up and grunts from the pain. Squinting, he looks around. “It’s night. What happened?”
“We fought the chaos dragon, but it was going too slowly,” I say. “None of the attacks did much damage at all. Then it turned to smoke by chanting a spell. I thought if I could silence it the way you did the Zeus mage…”
“You took my staff?” he asks.
I nod.
“Did it work?”
“Yes, but it took all my energy, and I passed out,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
Guy shakes his head. “Don’t be sorry. That was smart. We could have died if he wasn’t in physical form.”
I lower my gaze, because I can’t bear to see any grief in his eyes when I tell him the rest. “You did die. You…you burnt to death.”
Guy gasps and presses his hand to his face. I still can’t look at him, don’t want to see the pain at his realization, but I can hear him cry.
“Not again,” he whispers through a sob.
“I tried to heal you, but that’s the best I could do,” I say.
“You should have left me dead,” he says.
I snap my head back up to look at his face, which is contorted by his genuine horror. He’s barely recognizable, but those are still his beautiful brown eyes, and they’re filled with unimaginable pain.
“No,” I say. “I regret a lot of things I’ve done since the chaos dragon attacked, but I will never regret using one of my Kisses of Life to bring you back.”
Guy shakes his head and snarls in disgust as he looks at his hand. “What life can I lead as some creature? I’m hideous! Disgusting!”
“Hideous? Disgusting? How can you say such things about yourself?” I ask.
“Look at me!” Guy tries to shout, but the last word comes out in shreds from his still raw throat.
“You want me to look at you?” I ask. “I can see more of you than you can.”
I cup his face. My hands are too numb from the cold to feel it, but that doesn’t matter. I need to touch him. And though my lips are also frostbitten, I leave a trail of kisses across his scarred face.
“You’re beautiful,” I whisper between kisses. “Sexy.” I kiss either side of his mouth. Then I lean back a little so that he can see me say the truth I’ve been avoiding. “And I’m pretty sure I love you.”
I tremble, not from the cold but from those words. It’s like I’ve cast a spell that’s far too high for my level. Is that what the truth is? The most powerful magic, older than time itself.
Guy stares at me for a moment and then sobs. I wipe away his tears and press my lips to his. I’ve kissed him so many times, many of them the best I’ve ever had. There’s nothing passionate or skilled about this one, but I know it’s the truest because of the magic that passes between us.
A song pulls from me, sweet and lonely. A plaintive melody unravels from him. They braid together, forming a duet, and all the sadness in their tender notes disappears as our heartbeats fall into the same rhythm.
When the kiss ends, we pull away, but our eyes stay locked in wonder. There’s no denying what I admitted. Not with a song like that coming together. Like a scarf in the breeze, the notes drift away into the distance, leaving us in silence. That is until I hear a groan of pain.
“We’re not alone,” I whisper. I don’t know if I’m relieved or scared.
Until then, I hadn’t seen anyone. I was so focused on making sure the person next to me lived. Did my friends survive? Or is that a death rattle? Or is that the waking sounds of an enemy?
I start to get up so that I can see who it is, but pain radiates through me, and I wind up falling onto my back instead.
Guy leans over me, panic written on his wide eyes. “Lauren, did you heal me and not yourself?”
I nod.
“What were you thinking? Heal up!”
Casting Kiss of Life and Heal Major Wounds on Guy sapped a lot of my energy, and I may have to cast some pretty major spells before long. If I can just take the edge off the pain, though, I can make the rounds with my healing spells. So, I tap on Heal Minor Wounds on my menu.
I wince at the sting of sensation returning to my frostbitten parts.
My body still feels broken, but I’m no longer in agony whenever I move a little.
I call on my Strategy Under Duress. We may not be in a battle, but that doesn’t mean we aren’t fighting for our lives under difficult circumstances.
If I want us all to live, we’ll need more than my healing spells.
“I think our staffs rolled down the hill,” I tell Guy. “Can you get them while I try to find who’s hurt?”
“Of course,” he says. “I’ll also shed a little light on the situation.”
Guy taps on his menu, and a faint span of light about fifty feet in circumference hovers in the sky above us.
It gives a cold, fluorescent quality to the scene.
Everybody on the ground looks even more grim than they would have in a natural light.
Still, it gives me hope because one of those bodies is the chaos dragon, and beside it is Cait, rubbing at her head while sitting up.
I know I need to heal everyone, but I hobble toward her immediately. As I get closer, I see the dried blood on her various scabbed up wounds. I cry with relief because they must not be that bad.
Cait’s eyes grow wide with a similar relief when I reach her. Wincing, she gets to her feet and takes me into her arms. “Thank God,” she whispers against my temple. “I saw you lying on the ground, and I thought you’d died.”
“I just ran out of energy,” I tell her.
“Oh, Lauren…” Cait’s tears slide from her eyes onto me and then she pulls back to soak me in. “I thought I lost you. I thought…” She stops and presses her lips against mine.
There’s nothing tender about this kiss. It’s hungry and desperate, like she doesn’t know if we’ll ever share another.
Desire uncurls deep within me, and it’s only the sound of Guy’s approaching steps that helps me remember the terrible situation we’re in.
Our lips part, and I allow myself a moment to look at my fierce barbarian.
Cait’s gaze shifts from me to beyond my shoulder where Guy stands. She smiles at him. “You survived,” she says. “I thought with Lauren down, you might not.” Then she squints. “Guy, what happened?”
I turn to see him with his hand covering part of his face, looking downward. Maybe he knows I still think he’s beautiful but hates anyone else looking at him.
“He…he died,” I tell Cait. “I guess the dragon…”
“Oh God, I remember,” Cait whispers. “Right before I got in my last blow, the magnet spell ended, and the chaos dragon got high enough to breathe fire. I think Joshua was riding it when he took the last bit of its health bar.”
Cait’s eyes get wide. “Joshua! He must have fallen when the dragon did!”
“We’ll find him,” I say. “I’ll do whatever I can to get everyone healed up, but we’ll need our camp to get a long rest in.”
“I’ll call on it and set it up,” Cait says. Then she takes another look at Guy. “I’m so glad you’re alive.” Without another word, she moves past me and wraps Guy in a hug. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
Guy leans into the embrace, crying while Cait rocks him. When they part, Cait wipes away his tears.
“I’m going to take care of the camp,” Cait says. “You two do your thing and call out to me if you need my help.”
I nod in response as she walks to an area that’s far enough away from the dragon for comfort but close enough that the wounded won’t have too much difficulty getting to it.
“I found our staffs,” Guy says. “Looks like Miko grabbed them. I guess she saw we were passed out and thought she might need them.”
“How does she look?” I ask.
“Like she’s sleeping,” he answers. “She must have used up all her energy, but I don’t see any wounds.”
“Well, that’s a small blessing. Let’s go look at the rest.”
Joshua’s bones are broken, but he’s breathing. I cast Heal Major Wounds on him and feel like I might slump to the ground right then, but Guy positions me so that I can lean on him. After Cait carries a sleeping Miko to camp, she guides Joshua there as well.
Guy and I make our way to Sylvia. Like Miko, she’s unharmed, simply asleep from her energy draining out.
Traitor. I’m so tempted to leave her there to die from exposure, but I remind myself that Sylvia isn’t at fault.
She didn’t make that chaos dragon attack us, and she’s as much a victim as the rest of us.
The eidola is to blame. Zeus is to blame.
I’m tired of playing along like it’s not trying to get us all killed, though.
“Let’s get her to camp,” I say when Cait joins us. “But we’re tying her up. I don’t trust her. When she wakes up, she’ll have a lot to answer for.”